Nothing
symbolizes Western culture and advancement more than modern technology.
I remember many years ago excitedly passing around my fax number as
if it were magic to use telephone wires to transport photos and text
instantly around the world. Now we have camera-cell phones, iPods,
internet communications, bank cards, and in the not too distant future,
chip implants that will take over all electronic functions in our
life. The downside to electronic technology is barely even considered.
The headaches and brain cancers from cell phones, our total loss of
privacy, and rampant stress from being plugged in and accessible 24/7/365
are all very real results of its influence.

When
it comes to the rapid changes in food technology since WW II, I’ll
bet most people have never taken a moment to consider that the current
state of our physical health is likely due to eating food that is
no longer compatible with our physical bodies.

Food
technology came out of the need to store food for long periods of
time as well as to package and ship food over a distance so that it
wouldn’t spoil. In simpler times, drying, salting, pickling, canning
and freezing covered much of the food preservation process. Some of
these methods actually have the ability to preserve nutritional value
along with making sure the food is appetizing and edible. A longer
shelf life for products also saves manufacturers countless dollars
from waste as well as the ability to provide wider varieties of food
than ever before.

However,
in recent years, as methods of processing food have become more sophisticated,
these methods have incrementally diminished the quality of food. Anyone
who has ever eaten a juicy, vine-ripe tomato fresh from their garden
knows the rock-hard grocery-store version is a far cry from the real
thing. Food, or that which passes for food, is now a commodity in
a well-designed box, loaded with additives to make it look and taste
edible and treated like any other commercial product with no regard
to its ability to give us life or take it away and we wonder why we
are a nation of chronically-ill people. Sad to say, food technology
starts in the labs of the world’s great chemical conglomerates before
the first seed is planted on the farm and ends on the tip of our forks.
In fact, it is very hard to escape from eating manipulated food.

What
Happened to Our Farms?

Following
is a quote from Kirkpatrick Sale who wrote in The Nation, June 5,
1995.

"When
U.S. industrialism turned to agriculture after World War II…it went
at it with all that it had just learned on the battlefield, using
tractors modeled on wartime tanks to cut up vast fields, crop-dusters
modeled on wartime planes to spray poisons, and pesticides and herbicides
developed from wartime chemical weapons and defoliants to destroy
unwanted species. It was a war on the land, sweeping and sophisticated
as modern mechanization can be, capable of depleting topsoil at
the rate of 3 billion tons a year and water at the rate of 10 billion
gallons a year. It could be no other way: If a nation like this
beats its swords into plowshares, they will still be violent and
deadly tools."

According
to biochemist, Dr. Ross Hume Hall “Man can never be more than what
he eats.” In his 1974 book, Food for Nought he wrote:

Nourishment
of the American populace has undergone a startling transformation
since WW II. A highly individual system of growing and marketing
food has been transformed into a gigantic, highly integrated service
system in which the object is not to nourish or even to feed, but
to force an ever-increasing consumption of fabricated products.

Dr.
Hall was concerned that “The transformation has gone unmarked by government
agencies and learned bodies.” And that “The effects of the transformation
do not lend themselves to traditional methods of scientific and social
analysis.” Hall also said that “The energy crisis and food/population
imbalance are issues that are flogged to justify greater intensification
of a machinelike agricultural system, at a biological cost that mounts
every year.”

Presently
there are about 2,500 pesticides, herbicides, and food additives used
in the food industry. Reliable sources tell us that potatoes can be
contaminated with up to 29 different pesticides. You can get more
information on this type of abuse at The Organic Consumers Association
www.organicconsumers.org.

What
about the Science of Nutrition?

Back
in the 1800s, life was not yet a packaged commodity and promoting
world trade above all else was not the main focus of public policy
and law. The growth of the natural health industry, in what was an
unfettered free enterprise system at its best, showed a public desire
to enjoy the quality and freshness of foods, and there was even a
growing number of health-promoting specialty foods, food concentrates
and herbal elixirs that represent the precursors of today’s health
food stores and dietary supplement industry.

At
the same time, the modern medical community, led by the American Medical
Association, pooh-poohed the idea that diet and nutrition had anything
to do with health. After all, with the discovery of germs and the
adoption of the Louis Pasteur version of the “germ theory” that promised
to save all mankind from all future diseases, once synthetic drugs
had been developed to kill each and every one of them, the need to
even give nutrition a second thought was dismissed.

During
the time this same unfettered free enterprise system allowed ordinary
people to support the ever-growing nutrition industry, several colossal
nutrition deficiency epidemics occurred. Almost laughable in retrospect,
these epidemics are perfect examples of how the arrogance and ignorance
of the germ-fixated modern medical community reacts, confronted with
a national health crisis.

The
first crisis involved the many unexpected outbreaks of scurvy toward
the end of the 19th Century. In 1898, the American Pediatric Association
published a report that the growing scurvy epidemic among children
was due to a bacteria-caused ptomaine poisoning. The fact that the
scurvy issue had already been dealt with as a nutritional deficiency
a century earlier not withstanding, fixation on germs blinded medical
“experts” from using common sense. The new belief that scurvy was
really an infectious disease also persisted during WW I and was used
to explain why there was an outbreak of the disease among soldiers.
Medical “experts” claimed that in unsanitary conditions it was lice
that transmitted scurvy to the soldiers.

When
the truth became out, these scurvy outbreaks were found to be a lack
of vitamin C, caused, in many cases, by drinking boiled milk in the
process we call pasteurization, which was and still is being used
to protect people from germs believed to be found in raw milk. Boiling
milk destroys much of the nutritional value of milk including destroying
the vitamin C in it. With so many people, particularly children, depending
on milk as a main source of Vitamin C, the lack of it caused a deficiency.

Another
famous example of professional blindness to simple truths, are the
now infamous pellagra epidemics that went on for over a century. So
fixated on that old bugaboo…germs…. medical experts on both sides
of the Atlantic were convinced that pellagra was caused by all manner
of exposures to moldy corn, germ-infected sheep, and fungi-contaminated
corn excreted by chickens, to name some of the more prominent theories.

As
the pellagra outbreaks persisted, particularly in the southern U.S.,
panic was everywhere. In some places, pellagra victims were put into
isolation and there was talk of general quarantines. Medical teams
at the now-venerated Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, the very
model of the best in modern American medicine, were forbidden to even
discuss any cases in hospital there. At the same time, a new theory
of the cause of pellagra was emerging….pellagra was caused by airborne
insects.

Something
drastic was needed to address this national crisis, so the federal
government formed the Thompson-McFadden Commission to study the issue.
After dismissing any dietary connections with the plague, and the
suggestion that it was brought in by Italian immigrants, the official
finding was that pellagra was caused by stable flies.

However,
there was one level-headed and obscure Public Health officer named
Dr. Joseph Goldberger who went south and bothered to notice things
with powers of observation untainted by germ theory mania. He visited
the sick, either in rural areas or insane asylums, where many were
now housed to isolate them. It was through this simple system of scientific
inquiry and observation that he found his answer and announced it
at a medical conference in 1915.

Goldberger
realized that pellegra was not an infectious disease; it was not caused
by germs. What he observed was that every single victim of pellagra
was a person who ate mostly corn but did not vary his or her diet
with other foods. Goldberger came to this conclusion by simply noticing
that, in the asylums, while all the inmates were sick, not one single
worker in any insane asylum had pellagra and all of these people not
only ate what the inmates ate but they also had varied diets which
included nutrient-rich vegetables and meats.

Goldberger’s
findings were rejected by the Thompson-McFadden Commission in 1915
and the germ-theory armies vehemently campaigned against such thinking
claiming that his ideas were dangerous.

While
Goldberger continued to do experiments to prove his ideas until he
died in 1930. However the epidemic disappeared not soon after thanks
to better diets available by then and the isolation of niacin in the
laboratory, the specific nutrient that was lacking in the diet –the
true cause of pellagra.

My
book, The Miracle of Magnesium proves, beyond a shadow of a
doubt, that magnesium deficiency can cause, trigger, or worsen 22
diseases including heart disease, osteoporosis, migraines, severe
muscle cramps, high blood pressure, and elevated cholesterol. However,
magnesium is either ignored or outright rejected by a medical establishment
that promotes patented medications with innumerable side effects for
all these conditions.

The
ongoing disconnect between food and life not only occurs in corporate
food technology labs around the world but also in universities everywhere.
When medical research started discovering vitamins, nutrition, such
as modern medicine understands it, became a subset of biochemistry.
By the 1950s, researchers thought they had discovered all the vitamins
and, strange as this sounds, getting on with the real study of nutrition
fell by the wayside.

Worse
yet, while the scientific community could claim to have discovered
vitamins, the FDA, with the help of the AMA, ratcheted up a campaign
to get rid of what the FDA referred to as “nutritional nonsense”…or,
whatever the FDA, the AMA or their backers disagreed with, a campaign
that continues today, despite massive public support of nutritional
health.

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Presently,
nutrition may be regarded as a subspecialty of Internal Medicine,
yet there is a whole medical specialty called Bariatrics (Weight Loss
Management), which deals with the end result of poor nutrition! Clinical
nutrition itself is not a medical specialty; it was given over to
dieticians who develop those famous school lunches and hospital fare
and who supply diets to people based on the four food groups and prescriptions
from doctors who know very little about nutrition.For
part 2 click below.

Dr. Carolyn Dean
is a medical doctor, naturopathic doctor, herbalist, acupuncturist, nutritionist,
as well as a powerful health activist fighting for health freedom as president
of Friends of Freedom International. Dr.
Dean is the author of over a dozen health books, the latest of which is
"Death By Modern Medicine".

Elissa Meininger
is vice president of Friends of Freedom International and co-founder of
the Health Freedom Action Network, a grassroots citizens' political action
group. She is also a health freedom political analyst and can be heard
on the natural health radio show SuperHealth, broadcast weekly on station
KEBC (Information Radio 1340) in Oklahoma City.

Presently there are about 2,500 pesticides, herbicides, and food additives
used in the food industry. Reliable sources tell us that potatoes can
be contaminated with up to 29 different pesticides. You can get more information
on this type of abuse at The Organic Consumers Association.